Balaji Srinivasan calls for tech to "exit democracy" and seize local governments

https://newrepublic.com/article/180487/balaji-srinivasan-network-state-plutocrat

by jaysonelliot • 2 years ago

139 97 2 years ago

koolba• 2 years ago

Everyone would be welcome at the Gray Pride march—everyone, that is, except the Blues. Srinivasan defines the Blue political tribe as the liberal voters he implies are responsible for the city’s problems. Blues will be banned from the Gray-controlled zones, said Balaji, unlike Republicans (“Reds”).

So a reverse CHAZ?

throwaway484764• 2 years ago

It's either this or face another Nika riot of 532.

intellectronica• 2 years ago

I haven't been to SF since many years. Is it really that bad? Moving around, especially for rich tech people, especially within the US and the developed world in general, is really easy. If SF is really such a catastrophe, why are so many still there? To me it sounds a bit like some of the tech bros want to get into politics as a hobby and they picked this issue because it's especially salient to them. From far away it looks ... bizarre.

alephnerd2• 2 years ago

it sounds a bit like some of the tech bros want to get into politics as a hobby and they picked this issue because it's especially salient to them

It's pretty much this.

SF has issues, but a lot of that is visible only because the Financial District directly neighbors the poorest part of the city (Tenderloin, 6th street, civic center)

ghaff2• 2 years ago

Yeah. I’ve been there less recently than I used to go. Maybe the last time I was at the Moscone for an event I was sort of steeling myself for the zombie apocalypse. And yeah it’s not great around there and Union Square. I usually stay towards the Ferry Building to avoid the worst. But it’s not IMO much worse than it’s been for years and years.

prpl• 2 years ago

I think most “Tech Bros” rarely live outside of a few neighborhoods as well - SOMA, Mission/Mission Bay, Marina (rarer) or Pac Heights for the executives.

Much of the city has issues and it spills into the other neighborhoods, but campaigning primarily on the plight of those specific neighborhoods (which, with exception to pac heights and Mission bay, are where much of the problems are most severe) isn’t going to get you elected to citywide offices.

consumer4515• 2 years ago

This is so insane that it’s hard to believe.

JKCalhoun• 2 years ago

I had to check if it was April 1.

Any of the creators of the "Silicon Valley" TV show want a pitch for a new season?

photonthug• 2 years ago

Impressive, this is some of the most absolutely batshit crazy ranting I have seen in quite a while, and one of my hobbies is talking to crazy people.

I assume “grays” is riffing on the alleged alien type, and truly the whole master plan is like a caricature of a conspiracy theory.

Yes fellow humans, you enjoy your so called “banquets” do you not? Prepare to submit to my rule!

spencerflem7• 2 years ago

Greys is a reference to Slate Star Codex: https://www.slatestarcodexabridged.com/I-Can-Tolerate-Anythi...

Originally described in 2014 as: "typified by libertarian political beliefs, Dawkins- style atheism, vague annoyance that the question of gay rights even comes up, eating paleo, drinking Soylent, calling in rides on Uber, reading lots of blogs, calling American football “sportsball”, getting conspicuously upset about the War on Drugs and the NSA, and listening to filk – but for our current purposes this is a distraction and they can safely be considered part of the Blue Tribe most of the time"

But since then the tech world went off the deep end into anti-wokeness and the left has (rightfully imo) come to resent tech and tech companies so they've moved to be on the side of the "red tribe"

marstall• 2 years ago

insane, and childlike in its binary vision of what humanity is. it's like YA fiction. The notion that grown adults in 2024 in San Francisco, of all places, would be down with wearing a uniform in daily life, is so out to lunch I am presuming/hoping he means it as some kind of joke.

kylestlb• 2 years ago

i see plenty of patagonia uniforms in SF :)

AzzieElbab6• 2 years ago

what do you think a hoodie with a corporate logo is?

brigadier132• 2 years ago

It's pretty clearly tongue in cheek

“Grays should embrace the police, okay? All-in on the police,” said Srinivasan. “What does that mean? That’s, as I said, banquets. That means every policeman’s son, daughter, wife, cousin, you know, sibling, whatever, should get a job at a tech company in security.”

Politicians do this today. Deep blue politicians in New York have the police in their pocket just as much as in any red state.

“A huge win would be a Gray Pride Parade with 50,000 Grays,” said Srinivasan. “That would start to say: ‘Whose streets? Our streets!’ You have the AI Flying Spaghetti Monster. You have the Bitcoin parade. You have the drones flying overhead in formation ... You have bubbling genetic experiments on beakers … You have the police at the Gray Pride Parade. They’re flying the Anduril drones…”
Everyone would be welcome at the Gray Pride march—everyone, that is, except the Blues. Srinivasan defines the Blue political tribe as the liberal voters he implies are responsible for the city’s problems. Blues will be banned from the Gray-controlled zones, said Balaji, unlike Republicans (“Reds”).

This is literally what a gay pride march is.

While the Blues would be excluded, they would not be forgotten. Srinivasan imagines public screenings of anti-Blue propaganda films: “In addition to celebrating Gray and celebrating Red, you should have movies shown about Blue abuses … There should be lots of stories about what Blues are doing that is bad.”

Ever watch a Michael Moore film?

spencerflem7• 2 years ago

I totally disagree with your politics,

but I do think that your explanations make sense, or rather- while I think he is earnest in wanted a new state ruled by "Grey Tribe", given the book listed at the top he wrote: The Network State: How To Start a New Country, but these specific complaints do feel like he's doing a mean Haha gotcha, how would it feel now ?? sort of style

Or I guess put another way, I think he is both earnestly wanting it but also choosing these examples to be a comparison so it seems "fair"

pesus• 2 years ago

Morons like him are the reason I almost never talk about working in tech to most people. It seems pretty clear to me at this point that the bubble a large number of VCs/"tech bros" (for lack of a better term) exist in is psychologically harmful.

spencerflem7• 2 years ago

me too,

its so embarassing that the types of people like balaji represent us as an industry. my friends outside of tech world now treat being a software developer as a red flag

sublinear• 2 years ago

“Balaji is a friend of mine and is neither a dumbshit nor a clown,” tweeted economics blogger Noah Smith last June, defending Balaji from critics.

AzzieElbab6• 2 years ago

To those unfamiliar with Noah Smith, he is a leftist and very, very blue.

khuey2• 2 years ago

Noah is only a leftist if anyone to the left of Attila the Hun is a leftist. Noah is very much a neoliberal.

tootie2• 2 years ago

I think there's a lack of appropriate adjectives for people like Balaji and also Musk or even Marc Andreesen. It's plainly obvious that none of them are actually dumb. These are clearly people with high IQs and active imaginations. Where they fall down is in being prone to being wildly irrational. They're also just self-absorbed and seemingly lacking in empathy and compassion.

nostrademons• 2 years ago

It's a different form of rationality, one that is self-referential. They understand the Internet as a medium for discourse, where the audience is extremely large but the number of other memes competing for attention is also very large. They also understand that the more outrageous and anger-provoking a statement is, the more likely it is to go viral. Therefore, the way to ensure that your statements actually have an impact is to hype them up to the most provocative, outrageous form that you can, see who bites, piss people off, and get them talking.

We're discussing this article, after all, right? We know who Balaji is. While look at how many very rational "Show HN" posts here fail to get traction or reach the front page.

Oftentimes, there's a kernel of a true idea behind the hype, but it's been taken to the most extreme form possible simply because the most extreme form is the only one that goes viral.

LarryDarrell4• 2 years ago

I call it "Engineer Brain" after watching a talented relative descend into madness trying learn virology during the pandemic. It was further crystalized after the Titan submersible incident and reading about the terminal hubris of Stockton Rush.

We spend our lives specializing into ever smaller subdomains of already small domains. A lifetime of bending your brain in one direction, being well compensated, being told you are smart... it leads to tremendous gaffs once you step out of your little specialized world.

It's important to maintain a deep humbleness and acknowledge the gaps in your knowledge. Don't disregard experts in other fields because they are saying things that conflict with your biases. Learn to identify your biases and think about how they may limit you from gaining understanding. It's much more fun to go through life with the attitude of not knowing everything and listening to people who know what they know.

danans2• 2 years ago

These are clearly people with high IQs and active imaginations. Where they fall down is in being prone to being wildly irrational. They're also just self-absorbed and seemingly lacking in empathy and compassion.

What you are missing is that extreme wealth insulates them from any significant personal consequences of their logical imaginativeness, so such feedback never gets incorporated into their logic.

If the rest of us espoused fascism and then lost our jobs and standing in our communities, we would be in real trouble.

For the tech uber-wealthy (pun intended), money is community. Your community (peers or acolytes) will keep boosting you as long as you have it, because it completes the circular logic that explains your success.

DEADMINCE2• 2 years ago

These are clearly people with high IQs and active imaginations.

I only see evidence of wealth. Not talent, skill or ability.

consumer4515• 2 years ago

But they are doing just fine. Only those of us who see this as the insanity that it is, are falling down.

What mechanisms can fix this?

dist-epoch• 2 years ago

Balaji is a clown, a few years ago he was calling bitcoin a battery, because you can sell it and buy electricity with the money you got.

By this logic everything is a battery, a $100 bill is a battery, ...

khuey2• 2 years ago

He lost one million dollars in an insane bet he made with a guy on Twitter about hyperinflation.

delichon• 2 years ago

A creative mind that follows many trails spends time in very odd places. I too have some, uh, highly idiosyncratic notions, but that I prefer not to mention. I suspect that people who don't have been following fewer trails. I value these odd characters as scouts that happen to report the occasional bigfoot. If you take them as oracles, yeah they're horrible. If you take them as a source for "anything that good hackers would find interesting", there are pearls in the dross.

phyzome2• 2 years ago

There are plenty of other idiosyncratic people out there who aren't, entirely literally, calling for ethnic cleansing.

LightBug1• 2 years ago

Concerning considering the amount of tech douche's who worship at the feet of 'Balaji'.

leosanchez• 2 years ago

Ironic since Balaji is name of a god in India

seattle_spring2• 2 years ago

Maybe Balaji and Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh would be in good company.

karaterobot2• 2 years ago

If I had any illusions that big tech could run the world better than anybody else, I'd be more sympathetic to this position. I'd love to see a tech company try to function in a world where they can't just lay people off, or pivot in another direction, or sell off assets. In the real world, governments need stability, continuity, and at least some level of concern for people rather than OKRs. Tech companies are successful at making money—some of them, some of the time—but there is absolutely no evidence that they'd be good at doing anything else. They're optimized around a different set of rules, and a different game than governments are. It's just hubris and ignorance that would lead them to think they can apply their ridiculous systems to the world outside their gates.

itsoktocry• 2 years ago

They're optimized around a different set of rules, and a different game than governments are. It's just hubris and ignorance that would lead them to think they can apply their ridiculous systems to the world outside their gates.

What's ridiculous is that you can look at governments today, at any level, and imagine them being run worse.

spencerflem7• 2 years ago

It's incredibly easy, we have examples of dictatorships and fascism in living memory.

karaterobot2• 2 years ago

It's really easy for me to imagine my government being run worse than it is today.

But anyway, it's a fallacy to think that just because something is bad, replacing it with just anything at all would be an improvement. The thing you replace government with would have to be better suited to it, which there is just no basis for saying Silicon Valley is. In fact, there's enough evidence that SV is bad at governing their own very very small kingdoms, even with the benefit of an existing infrastructure and rule of law, established by others, in place.

Man, it's weird for me to be in the position of defending government. I'm not that guy. But tech leadership is just laughably unsuited to replacing them.

krapp• 2 years ago

Yes, believe it or not, government is not always maximally evil, corrupt and incompetent at all levels, all of the time.

We live in a complex reality full of nuance, not a cartoon.

notfromhere• 2 years ago

Yes, very easily. Go to a second or third world country and you will see what a bad government looks like.

The stability of western governance breeds the idea that this is just the natural state of things. Same thing with anti-vaxxers thinking we don’t need vaccines because they have no memory of what life was like before them.

tetha• 2 years ago

I'm not sure if you're aware of how much irreducible complexity the overall government apparatus deals with.

Yeah there are simple things that can be improved, like not using physical mail, and better appointment handling and such. That exists. But if you talk to people working in this business... those are the easy parts and people are working on those.

Then there is thousands of requests for building permits and these have to be checked, or people die because of buildings collapsing. And you need a skilled person to look at each individual location one at a time, because of physics. Those parts are really hard.

swatcoder• 2 years ago

What's ridiculous is that you can look at governments today, at any level, and imagine them being run worse.

That's a pithy and meaningless statement that doesn't add anything constructive to the conversation. If we take it as true, then we'd have to assume that you're actually optimistic about government, since it suggests that the only direction we can go is up.

But of course the reality is that that for as dysfunctional or corrupt as we might see some operating government, of course it could still be even much worse so still. That doesn't even require imagination, since examples abound across modern geography and even recent history.

If you can't even imagine things that are plainly visible in reality, then, sure I can see why you might struggle to imagine what could be worse. But we're not all so afflicted.

TheLoafOfBread• 2 years ago

Well let's look into history on Red Khmers or pre-WW2 massacres of Stalin's Russia. Yes it can be much worse.

I am not having any illusions about Tech companies who are either running as dictatorship or feudalism (Board + C-suites making decisions like aristocracy), rest either goes along or is punished.

failuser• 2 years ago

You don’t need to imagine. Just look at some other countries. Look at Russia, for example, it’s even the worst one.

Americans are so spoiled by their state, it can be better, but it can be so much worse.

stop50• 2 years ago

Those who don't learn from history are doomed to repeat it.

azinman22• 2 years ago

Why is this article flagged? It seems very appropriate to be here.

AnimalMuppet3• 2 years ago

Most politics is off-topic for HN. Also, it typically leads to shouting matches, which are terrible discussions. It's not what HN aims for, and so political articles usually get flagged.

Arguably, this one is more on-topic than most politics. Also arguably, the discussion hasn't degenerated (yet). So, maybe flagged just because of politics, rather than because the discussion is awful.

By the way, flagging is done by users, not by the moderators. So it's us, not YC, that thinks this is problematic (or likely to become so).

LarryDarrell4• 2 years ago

From the article:

"described a speech in which he “told a group of young entrepreneurs that the United States had become ‘the Microsoft of nations’: outdated and obsolescent.”

“The speech won roars from the audience at Y Combinator, a leading start-up incubator,”

I think this article is the most on-topic there could be.

The users here that want Tech News and Tech News only are doing themselves, and the community a disservice.

jaysonelliot• 2 years ago

I fear the flagging is most likely by people who sympathize with Balaji's worldview, and don't like reading the comments criticizing it.

consumer4515• 2 years ago

Are not posts where there is a potential conflict of interest explicitly called out as something that HN works to not censor?

User flags can be overridden by moderators. There are some very notable examples, usually I have been very impressed by this.

So far, this is not one of those cases.

iguana_lawyer• 2 years ago

Because $$$

M2Ys4U• 2 years ago

Well this part of the article could be one reason why:

Even more disturbing, however, is Balaji’s tight connection with Tan, the Y Combinator CEO who has publicly aligned himself with the Network State for years. “I legit believe [Y Combinator] is a prototype model for what @balajis talks about when he says the Network State,” wrote Tan in August 2022, shortly before he was named CEO.

archagon2• 2 years ago

This is the problem with living in a democracy while working for a feudal corporation. You might get it in your head that a feudal political structure is somehow more efficient, rewarding, or just, and bring this with you to the voting booth.

We desperately need more democracy in the workplace.

archagon2• 2 years ago

Writing something like this should be socially equivalent to soiling yourself in public, and yet a number of higher-ups in the SV/VC space (plus plenty or regular techies) seem to support this guy. It is truly disturbing.

seattle_spring2• 2 years ago

The idea, he said, is to do to San Francisco what Musk did to Twitter.

This is such a wonderful, perfect metaphor for who Balaji is and the merit of his ideas.

Please leave SF alone. It’s a city with a ton of problems, but it’d be a whole lot worse as whatever, um, this is.

I honestly genuinely hate that I have to push back against non-tech folks hating on tech people and assuming we’re all like Balaji and Musk. However, the amount of people who support them makes me take a step back and realize that I really might not fit in with the tech community at all. Stuff like this disgusts me.

deepfriedchokes• 2 years ago

This is very obviously a joke.

phyzome2• 2 years ago

There's no indication of satire here.

coldtrait• 2 years ago

I've genuinely never understood a single thing he's talked about ever. I remember he was on Sam Harris' podcast talking about his ideas and none of it made sense to me at all. I don't think I'll get a response, but I'll try anyway. Can anyone point me in the right direction?

johnea• 2 years ago

I didn't know Garry Tan, the current Y Combinator CEO, was such a nut job...

The quotes cited are straight up fascism...

consumer4515• 2 years ago

As I love this website, and the societal benefit which real YC disruption has accomplished, so very much, I wish that I could disagree with you.

I must be misunderstanding something. Please someone explain this to me.

consumer4515• 2 years ago

Balaji (2021):

Btw, I rarely post personal news on here, but I moved to Asia awhile back and will be splitting time between India and Singapore .
Why? They are optimistic on technology, they’ve brought hundreds of millions of people online, and they both speak தமிழ் & have great dosas!

https://twitter.com/balajis/status/1355088787286544384

---

Meta Edit: I would just like to add that this one of the most vibrant recent discussions, with many 5 digit karma posters, and this is not a flame war.

This seems to happen a lot in the last couple years. Some of the most interesting discussions now appear to happen, post-flag. What does this mean for HN?

Balaji Srinivasan calls for tech to "exit democracy" and seize local governments

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